Sorry hippies, but the group making a stir in the media after sending letters to about 30 governors demanding they “step down” or be removed isn’t a right wing militia but a tax-protester group that admits on their website that they would throw out the Constitution if it were feasible. The Guardians of the Free Republic say they’re “using the enemy’s weapon (the Constitution) against them” to achieve their goal. Their ultimate goal is to … do something which isn’t really that clear but it includes arresting everyone from the Internal Revenue Service and never paying taxes again which would re-establish God’s law on Earth, stop Satan (who I guess is a auditor for the I.R.S.) and otherwise create some sort of loosely Confederated Heaven on Earth.

I’ve had many online run-ins with tax protesters and most of them are superficially involved in the “patriot” movement but promote Stalinism, White Nationalism, Trutherism and all the various “isms” that would be considered fringe in any party not chaired by Alex Jones. The “Grand Jury” movement, the intellectual gutter from which this group congealed, is in fact old news. They’ve been around since the Clinton administration (if not before), vomiting out the occasional threat to officials about how they were going to be arrested … for the crime of somehow ending up the villain in some online-propagated conspiracy theory involving the Rothchilds, Bush and Jewish Space Lizards. I’ve also had my run-ins with the neo-Confederate movement which, as an aside, is overrun with perverts.

The danger of these groups is that they’re, well, full of nuts. In other words, these groups are a collection of crazies who were probably unstable to begin with. In that sense these groups serve a positive function; we know what they’re up to and who they hang out with. I don’t know about you, but I like having my weirdos all bunched together.

“Traditionally, critique of the IRS has come from the right, such as the Christian patriot movement, but [sovereign citizen] movements also invoke a lot of left-wing ideas like anti-capitalism that are consistent with the times and the downturn in the economy, where people may have property liens against them,” says George Michael, an expert on political extremism at the University of Virginia’s College at Wise.

Author Patrik Jonsson otherwise seems at a loss to explain this strange lefty/righty ideology, but what this group espouses does indeed have a name – Falangism. A quick read of their literature shows that the group is literally fascists led by a council of “Guardian Elders” who want to plan a peaceful coup in America to avoid the coming World War. Luckily they also happen to just be harmless kooks and I doubt they’ll be giving anyone sane any ideas.